Page:Wilhelm Liebknecht - Socialism; What It Is and What It Seeks to Accomplish - tr. Mary Wood Simons (1899).djvu/24

 labor, which creates all value and wealth, is condemned to poverty and slavery. The employer enriches himself through the labor of his wage slaves, to whom he pays in the form of wages only a part of the proceeds of their work; the unpaid remainder he puts in his pocket as "profit"—a robbery which differs from the usual robbery only in this, that he is not punished by the present class laws. Or is there, forsooth, an essential difference between the employer who withholds from his laborers a part of the product of their labor and himself appropriates this part, and the "humane" highway robber who satisfies himself with relieving the traveler, through the logic of a drawn pistol, of only a part of his goods, but who before the law is not, therefore, less a highway robber?

The present manner of production, resting on the basis of the wage system, has as a result on the one hand the accumulation of property in the hands of a few and the corruption of these few as a result of excessive possessions; on the other hand, there is impoverishment of the masses and pauperism. The worker, in the midst of the riches which he has created, cannot satisfy his smallest necessity; privation, unhealthful workshops and factories steal his life strength, as the employer steals from him the proceeds of his labor; lingering sickness and an early death await him. He has no family life, for, since his wages do not suffice for existence, wife and child must follow him into the factory. For the budding daughter he has the prospect of the short, glittering misery of prostitution, or the long, leaden, sunless misery of the life of a proletariat's wife.

Who that groans under the pressure of these conditions unworthy of mankind will not unite with us in the call: "Down with the wage system!"

"Down with the wage system!" That is the